Dover boss Andy Hessenthaler doesn’t want his team to become a one-trick pony.

Whites put their focus on delivering crosses into the box and it paid off with a 2-0 win at Hampton last weekend.

It’s more a case of mixing up their play for Hessenthaler, who felt his team haven’t been asking enough questions of opponents from wide areas.

“It’s something we’ve looked at previously and we’ve got to get the best out of the players that we’ve got,” said Hessenthaler.

“We’ve got to work the ball into wide areas. It was a tough pitch at Hampton on Saturday, it was soft and any more rain might have seen the game called off so we had to get it wide anyway.

“We tried to create two-against-one situations with our full-backs pushing on as well. It’s something that we’ve identified.

“You can become a bit predictable, a bit too long at times. We’ve got to get on the ball and play through the thirds or get it wide. Because we’ve got Alfie Pavey in the team, sometimes we think we have to get it up to him straight away, as he’s very good at that. But we’ve got to do more than that and make sure we’re not predictable.”

Jake Goodman headed in an early opener and Luke Wanadio tucked away a penalty at Hampton after another dangerous centre.

“We worked on it during the week, we don’t put enough balls in the box but we’ve got the players who can do that,” added Hessenthaler.

“We swapped Luke Wanadio to the right, and he can get good crosses in. The first goal came from a short-corner routine when Alfie Paxman crossed the ball in and the second was handball from a corner which gave us the penalty.

“We’ve got to put more crosses in, that’s what Alfie Pavey deserves. He will want more goals and he should have scored on Saturday, he’ll be the first to admit that.

"He didn’t score on Saturday but his work-rate was great and he occupied their centre-halves.

“I worked with Paul McCallum at Eastleigh and we always said to get crosses in as he was one of the best forwards in the league for that, and he ended up top goalscorer that season.”

The Hampton win put Dover 12th, six points outside the play-off places in National League South, ahead of a run of four games in the next 10 days.

Whites host St Albans on Saturday and then travel to lowly Cheshunt on Tuesday night.

The FA Trophy exit to Uxbridge apart, it’s been a good spell for Dover but hamstring injuries to Lee Martin and Goodman last weekend means their squad will be tested to the limit.

“The problem we’ve got is that we haven’t got a big squad,” noted Hessenthaler. “That’s the worry for me, we’re down to 16 players at the moment so we’ve got to hope we can get through this period.

“Our away form has been good, we’ve beaten Weymouth and Bath, and now Hampton as well, and we’ve drawn at Welling and Chelmsford.

“At home we got back-to-back wins but we lost to Concord when we were poor. However, if someone had said we’d get to the start of December and be six points outside the play-off places I’d have snatched their hand off given we were a totally new squad - now we’ve got to find a bit more consistency.

“We’ve only lost two in 11 league matches, and we didn’t do great in the FA Trophy game. But our aim is to get in and around the play-offs this season and that’s still the aim.”